Vikram confirms doing a Rs 300 cr multilingual titled Mahavir Karna; film will release on Christmas 2019

Chiyaan Vikram is slowly limping back to normalcy. His dad Vinod Raj passed away last week and the actor is fully concentrating on the work front to come out of the huge personal loss. On Sunday, Vikram made a surprise announcement on Instagram hinting his current mindset. The National Award-winning actor wrote ‘A sun rises as the sun sets’ and announced his historic period film Mahavir Karna with RS Vimal, who made his debut in Malayalam film industry in 2015 with the critically acclaimed biographical romantic-drama Ennu Ninte Moideen. [caption id=“attachment_4292659” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  The first look of Mahavir Karna[/caption] RS Vimal had plans to make a film based on Karna, the main protagonist of Hindu epic Mahabharata and announced that Malayalam actor Prithviraj Sukumaran would play the lead. Vimal also announced that the budget of the film would be around Rs 300 crore but later in the year, the film’s producer Venu walked out. “When the film was announced, I thought could pull it off in Rs 60 crore but the final estimate was much higher and that is why I was unable to fund Karnan”, said Venu in an interview. After a lot of discussions, RS Vimal came to a conclusion that the Rs 300 crore budget can be recovered only by making Karnan as a pan-Indian film. “When Vimal approached Vikram to play Karna, he readily agreed. The film will be produced by United Film Kingdom, a production house based in New York”, said a source close to the director. To be predominantly shot in Hindi, Mahavir Karna will also be dubbed in other regional languages like Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. RS Vimal is planning to rope in leading actors from various Indian languages to make sure that audiences across the country find an emotional connect and top technicians will also be working in the film. Vikram is currently occupied with two Tamil films — _Saamy Square_ , the sequel to his super hit cop action film Saamy and _Dhruva Natchathiram_ , a slick spy thriller with director Gautham Menon. Vikram will complete Dhruva Natchathiram before April because the film is scheduled to release in May while the producers of Saamy Square are eyeing for a Ramzan release. The versatile actor is also said to be in talks with Kamal Haasan’s erstwhile associate Rajesh M Selva, who made his debut with the action thriller film Thoongaa Vanam in 2015. Kamal’s Raaj Kamal Films is planning to fund the project but Vikram should complete Rajesh’s film in five months because he has to shoot for Mahavir Karna from October 2018. RS Vimal is planning to release Mahavir Karna for Christmas 2019 in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.